Monday, June 17, 2013

The Hands of the Blacks by Luis Bernardo Honwana

I don’t remember
now how we got on to the subject, but one day, Teacher said that the palms of
the Blacks’ hands were much lighter than the rest of their bodies. This is
because only a few centuries ago, they walked around with them like wild
animals, so their palms weren’t exposed to the sun, which made the rest of
their bodies darker. I thought of this when Father Christiano told us after
catechism that we were absolutely hopeless, and that even the pygmies were
better than us, and he went back to this thing about their hands being lighter,
and said it was like that because they always went about with their hands
folded together, praying in secret. I thought this was so funny, this thing of
the Blacks’ hands being lighter, that you should just see me now. I do not let
go of anyone, whoever they are, until they tell me why they think that the
palms of the Blacks’ hands are lighter. Doña Dores, for instance, told me that
God made Blacks’ hands lighter so they would not dirty the food they made for
their masters, or anything else they were ordered to do that had to be kept
clean.

Señor Antunes,
the Coca-Cola man, who only comes to the village now and again when all the
Cokes in the cantinas have been sold,
said it was a lot of baloney. Of course, I do not know if it was really such,
but he assured me, it was. After that I said, “All right, it was baloney,” and
then he told me what he knew about this thing of the Blacks’ hands. It was like
this: “Long ago, many years ago, God the Father, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary,
St. Peter, many other saints, all the angels that were in Heaven, and some of
the people who had died and gone to Heaven—they all had a meeting and decided
to create the Blacks. Do you know how? They got hold of some clay and pressed
it into some second-hand molds and baked the clay of creatures, which they took
from the heavenly kilns. Because they were in a hurry and there was no room
next to the fire, they hung them in the chimneys. Smoke, smoke, smoke—and there
you have them, black as coals. And now, do you want to know why their hands
stayed white? Well, didn’t they have to hold on while their clay baked?”

When he told me
this, Señor Antunes and the other men who were around us were very pleased and
they all burst out laughing. That very same day, Señor Frias told me that
everything i had heard from them there had been just one big pack of lies.
Really and truly, what he knew about the Blacks’ hands was right—that God
finished men and told them to bathe in a lake in Heaven. After bathing, the people
were nice and white. The Blacks, well. They were made very early in the morning and at this hour, the water in the lake was very
cold, so they only wet the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet
before dressing and coming to the world.

But i read in a
book that happened to mention the story, that the Blacks have hands lighter
like this because they spent their lives bent over, gathering the white cotton
of Virginia and i dont know where else. Of course, Doña Estefania did not agree
when i told her this. According to her, it is only because their hands became
bleached with all that washing.

Well, i do not
know what to think about all this but the truth is that however calloused and
cracked they may be, Black hands are always lighter than the rest of him. And
that’s that!

My mother is the
only one who must be right about this question of a Black’s hands being lighter
than the rest of his body. On the day that we were talking about it, i was
telling her what i already knew about the question, and she could not stop
laughing. When i was talking, she did not tell me at once what she thought
about all this and she only talked when she was sure that i wouldn’t get tired
of bothering her about it. And even then, she was crying and clutching herself around
the stomach like someone who had laughed so much that it was quite unbearable.
What she said was more or less this:

“God made Blacks
because they had to be. They had to be, my son. He thought they really had to
be. Afterwards, He regretted having made them because other men laughed at them
and took away their homes and put them to serve as slaves and not much better.
But because He couldn’t make them all white, for those who were used to seeing
them black would complain, He made it so that the palms of their hands would be
exactly like the palms of the hands of other men. And do you know why that was?
Well, listen: it was to show that what men do is only the work of men... that
what men do is done by hands that are the same—hands of people. How, if they
had any sense, would know that before anything else they are men. He must have
been thinking of this when He made the hands of those men who thank God they
are not black!”

After telling me
all this, my mother kissed my hands. As i ran off to the yard to play ball, i
thought that i had never seen a person cry so much as my mother did then.

hi! thank you for posting this, helped a lot, also i am very happy to see grade 8 students (like me) putting much effort in running an educational blog rather than doing other things! thank you once again and kudos!